Category: First Steps

I want to work in the agricultural / food sector … or back in the wine sector …

These are the elements that make me smile.

I want to connect French and beauty and food and wine and writing and travelling and intelligent, thought-provoking, energy-giving conversation and like minds and public speaking and innovation and work with purpose and blank sheets of paper and strategising and leading …

with a good income …

I want to muse and mull and develop and pilot.

I want to connect dots.

… for an idea that I am inspired by …

…and in the trying to find this something, this thing to ‘love’, this thing that will feed my soul … I am … nowhere …

… or, rather, I am in a maze of mirrors- staring at my own reflection … trying to decide whether there’s a hidden door or next step forward or whether retracing my path is a better course …

Everyone talks about their ‘passion’ … very few talk about how hard it was to identify.

This question mirrors a second one that replaces “this blog” with “my life”; but that’s for later.

Do I want to investigate ethical, delicious, ‘well’-infusing eating? Do I want to concentrate on exploring what brings ‘joy’ in life? Do I want to empower and highlight women? Do I want to incorporate more beauty into my own life? Do I want to offer my creativity an outlet? Do I want to connect, and connect with, like-minds through writing? Do I want to spark change? Do I want to create value?

Yes.

Yes x 8.

… and now … how …

?

And I sat down again … and again … and felt frustration rise again … and again …

And before, Reader, you think that there’s going to be an answer at the end of this particular entry – let me disabuse you of this possibility now – I still have no idea. Feel free to continue … or leave me here …

But tonight I went to yoga; a class that I can’t usually arrive at in time.

5pm – a work-obligated impossibility.

But tonight I was home – and was pulled towards the unknown – teacher and class at the Gertrude Street Yoga Centre.

I am attracted by the unknown … but not to the unknown … an interesting dichotomy.

I’m not sure if I’ve written about this before, but I have never really liked yoga.

#Confession

I was first introduced at a ‘School’ of yoga – what seems like an aeon ago. I was in one of the first formative years of University, a gym-goer (to lose weight) and looking for something to feed soul as well as body. I decided that yoga was it.

Yoga was not it.

I am a perfectionist by nature. I do things, I do them well. This often stops me from beginning – but it always pushes me to the end, once begun.

This school taught ‘correct’ posture, ‘correct’ breath, ‘correct’ mind emptiness. It gave me an excellent grounding in yoga practice that assists me still – even in the class of today. But it also gave me something to strive for …

And so my long, often stressful, relationship\. I was attracted to the idea of fluid movement, extended body, mind flow … but could never quite ‘accomplish’ it …

But tonight there was a question asked with every pose “Does it feel comfortable?” and the ideas of ‘making space’ and ‘taking space’ that resonated.

I realised that each posture is a way of filling my space. Taking up space. Elongating. Extending. Feeling every muscle …

And I realised that in each posture, comfort was the most important element – but ‘comfort’ in my own skin. ‘Perfect’ was nothing other than that which I …

in the ‘me, my self, I’ /no-one else / just me, context …

feel.

Some days, I know that I want to curl, to hug, to be as small as I can be … to feel as little as possible … and those days I allow my self from time to time … but I also know that they aren’t good for me long term …

And today, I wanted to create my own space – to breathe through movement and to feel every muscle; to let go.

So today – I did.

And today, I ended an hour feeling like molten gold – golden-hued fluidity, enduring, assured that where I was and how I was is perfect.

So – in letting go – I found what I was looking for in my yoga practice. In letting go, I found the sensation that had attracted me in the first place.

And in relation to the blog – and, indeed, my life, I haven’t quite worked out how I can do all of the above … but I do have more faith that an answer will present itself if I stop searching for it and simply make space for it to arrive.

I need someone inviting me, poking me, or something that prods me, into the first step.

I would love to be the person who sees the opportunity – the potential fun to be had in the unknown or undiarised … who is energised by the mere thought of doing something.

I know those people – you know those people. They are the ones that are surrounded by a group, who are always ‘out’ … they seem very light, carefree … the human equivalent of a Van Gogh wind.

The odd element in my life – I am the person who gets energy from both the unknown and the undiarised … when I’m doing them.

It’s just the first step that needs to be taken … by me … that offers the obstacle.

I was at home yesterday … a Friday … a sunny Friday … a Friday where I should have felt compelled, at the very least, to step outside.

I know that ‘should’ indicates a whole host of other issues … but I ‘should’ have because I knew that I would feel better if I did. I knew that I would feel more connected to the world and with that, my energy levels would rise and with that, I would be more inclined to step out a little further and with that … who knows …

… and yet … I couldn’t drag myself from the dark that had become my apartment (I had closed the blackout blinds at 6am after deciding not to go to the gym) until 4pm and a yin yoga class.

Even then, if truth be told, as well as the enticing idea of a class that I generally can’t get to and that required only a passive-me, I needed the little push of the imminent arrival of house guests and conversation that my brain was not prepared for …

So I stepped out of the house.

And the class was delicious – smile-inducing. And it allowed me to work out my plans for the evening and have those plans fully formed when I returned to houseguests who are also good friends. And, when I returned to good friends, I was mentally prepared and genuinely happy to see them which, in turn made them comfortable, which, in turn, made me happy …

I have just come from an osteopathic appointment where I spoke French for an hour … for me, French allows me to lose myself; it’s as if the wide, low, three-rail farm gates leading to an expanse of my brain not used in the everyday have swung open on oiled hinges.

To speak French is satisfying; chocolate cake-level satisfaction for me …

It is a beautiful language; poetic, fluid, melodic, elegant …

… but it is not necessarily a joyful language.

What is the most joyful language in the world? What is the most joyful culture in the world?

… because I don’t feel as ‘pushed’ as I was a year ago; and not even a quarter of that ‘swallowed-whole’ feeling of 12 years ago.

I remember both … but at a distance.

So – can I write about my current ‘location’ now? When a previous one has been so much more ‘reader-worthy’?

… while I’m not back in the suffocating world of self-imposed and self-regulated expectations with self-rated outcomes (generally ‘not-quite-enough’), my current space is not not in the same general vicinity.

I have landed back at a cross-roads where I can hesitate a little longer or plough headlong down the unknown path … which has the allure that only the unknown can have … until it becomes known.

…

But can I truly write about something so mundane? Can I be a writer of ‘non-critical life-assessment’?